The Characters of Creation: The Men, Women, Creatures, and Serpent Present at the Beginning of the World

By Daniel Darling

Most Christians are familiar with the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” But push beyond those iconic words, and sometimes the details get a little hazy. And strange. God walked around in a garden? Eve was made from Adam’s rib? A talking serpent? And what the in the world were the “Nephilim”? In The Characters of Creation, Daniel Darling re-introduces readers to the story they thought they knew. He explains the Bible’s story of how we got here and how things got messed up, and gives fresh insights into the first people in God’s unfolding plan of redemption—from Adam and Eve, The Serpent, Cain and Abel, and Noah.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moody Publishers
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9780802475398

Daniel Darling

Daniel Darling is an award-winning writer, author, and Christian leader whose public profile expanded exponentially as a result of being the subject of national news stories, including coverage by NBC News, Christianity Today, CNN, the Associated Press, and other outlets for his appeal to unity in the midst of adversity. He is a regular guest on national television, including Morning Joe, CNN, and Fox News, as well as CBN. He is a regular contributor to USA Today and a columnist for World magazine, and his work has also been featured by the Washington Post, National Review, Christianity Today, the Gospel Coalition, and the Washington Times. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Dignity Revolution, A Way with Words, and The Characters of Christmas. Dan hosts the weekly podcast The Way Home, leads the Land Center for Cultural Engagement, and speaks at churches and conferences around the country. He and his wife, Angela, have four children and reside in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

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INTRODUCTION

In the Beginning, God 

The hero of creation is God.¹

—BRUCE WALTKE

Afew days before I sat down to write this book, I bought a truck. I’ve been wanting one for a long time, and with my oldest daughter now driving my sedan, this was my chance. I found a pretty good deal. I have to say it feels really good. I’ve been driving down the road blasting Boy Gets a Truck by Keith Urban and feeling like I’m on top of the world.

There was one small fix I made, a cosmetic adjustment that made my wife smile and my almost-teenage son excited. The Ford logo on the front of the truck was worn, to the point where you could make out a faint image of the iconic insignia, but couldn’t quite see it in all of its glory. So I did what every self-respecting Ford owner would have done. I Googled Ford logo for F-150 and had it shipped from Amazon.

Well, yesterday it arrived, and I popped it on that front grille. And yes, the Keith Urban is cranked up a little louder. I feel good.

Something occurred to me as I was doing all this. Ask a proud Ford owner, and they will tell you why Ford trucks are the best. It’s like this with any of the products we enjoy. Seeing that Apple on the back of my laptop makes me feel warm inside and confident that I’m using a quality product. And don’t even get me started on off-brand peanut butter that’s not Jif. I can’t even!

That legendary blue Ford symbol, that iconic Apple, the Nike Swoosh—they all communicate one message: This product was made by someone you trust.

Imagine, for a moment, if when I first pulled up and showed all my buddies my new truck (a thing that guys do, by the way), one of them asked, What did you buy? and I say, Oh, I don’t know who makes it. I just like it. Or if I said something like, We are not really all that clear about how it was actually constructed. I just know it drives really well.

My buddies would think I inhaled some truck fumes. Nobody says that. We are proud of the maker and designer of our products. I mean, I went on Amazon and bought a new logo plate for this very purpose because I want the world to know who made my truck.

I promise this isn’t a book about brands and logos. The only reason I’m talking about it is simply this: If a two-ton hunk of aluminum and steel like my Ford declares its maker, how much so does a complex world point toward a designer? This is what creation is all about, really. King David wrote in Psalm 19:1 that the heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands. It’s as if this world, the universe, the cosmos, and the creatures in this world are not-so-subtly shouting that we have been carefully crafted and made and designed. Creation is about declaring that we have not just arrived on the doorstep of destiny, the product of a mysterious explosion of atoms and chemicals, but are the intentional design of a loving Creator.

God Is the Story of Creation

This reality is why I’ve always been fascinated by Genesis. Every single question I have about the world, about myself, about almost everything, is rooted in this beautiful book of beginnings. That is why I felt compelled to follow up The Characters of Christmas and The Characters of Easter with a new project on the people who were there when it all began.

But before we can understand the characters of creation, we must first bow before the Author of Creation. God is not just another actor in this drama, a figure we mold and massage into a deity of our liking. Instead, the Bible opens by describing the formation of the world as an act that begins with the One who had no beginning, who is always there. Jesus would later testify to the religious leaders that "before Abraham was, I am. Theologians call this God’s pre-existence."

I’ve been reading Genesis 1 for four decades, and yet every time my eyes fall on those words, I can’t help but be met by awe and wonder. In the beginning … God. I love what British Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner writes: "It’s no accident that God is the subject of the first sentence of the Bible, for this word dominates the whole chapter and catches the eye at every point of the page."² Physicist Arthur Compton once remarked that in the beginning God is a phrase that is the most tremendous ever penned.³

Why are these four simple words at the beginning of our Bibles the most tremendous ever penned? The Bible is making the claim that the entire cosmos and everything in it had a purposeful and orderly origin—and that God was there. In other words, there was no violent clash of equal deities vying for supremacy. There was no random eruption of atoms that resulted in the order and design of the universe. The Bible asserts that a loving Father formed the universe and carefully crafted the human beings who bear His image.

I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come (Isa. 46:10 NIV); I am the first and I am the last, God whispers to the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 44:6). John reminds us that God was in the beginning (John 1). The psalmist declares, Before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world, from eternity to eternity, you are God (Ps. 90:2).

From eternity to eternity, you are God. For finite creatures, this is hard to wrap our minds around. Everything in our lives had a beginning and has a fixed endpoint, but God is eternal and transcendent. He is outside of time. Theologian John Frame writes that it is significant that the world has a beginning, and that God exists before that beginning … the Creator precedes the creation.⁴

We cannot possibly comprehend the fullness of who God is. Throughout the ages our most brilliant minds have merely scratched the surface. And yet as we begin a book about the characters of creation it is important for us to pause and dwell on God for a moment. We must understand that God is no mere character, but He is the story, the author, the beginning of creation. He’s not one in a pantheon of feuding gods as the first readers of Moses’s words in Genesis may have imagined. He’s not one with the universe as many religions today might muse. He is not a figment of our imagination, a kind of shape-shifting deity who conforms around our preferences.

God stands outside of His creation; He is other than His creation; He is above His creation.

This short phrase also tells us how God created. In the beginning, God created implies that God began His creative acts with … nothing. Stay with me here for a moment. In one sense, the act of creating is something shared by both creator and creation, especially humans (more on that in a future chapter). Right now, I’m creating this chapter. I’m making something new that didn’t exist before. You create in your daily life, whether building furniture or launching new projects or filling out spreadsheets or baking a cake.

There is a vast difference, though, between our creation and God’s. When we create, we start with raw materials. I start every book with knowledge gained by other books, with a MacBook and software, with a mind crafted by God in my mother’s womb. When a carpenter crafts furniture, he starts with raw or repurposed wood. When a baker makes a cake, she begins with sugar and flour and yeast and a thousand other ingredients.

Let’s go back now to my beloved Ford F-150. This truck’s construction points back to its creator. Yet we all know the employees in the Ford factory began with raw materials, like aluminum, steel, leather, glass, and plastic. In fact, as I’m writing, there are thousands of brand-new cars on lots all over the world right now that can’t be driven or sold because there is a microchip shortage. The Ford F-150 and every other car depends on the availability of stuff that already exists.

God’s creative acts at the beginning of the world were different. Theologians have a term for this: creation ex nihilo, a Latin word that simply means out of nothing, something. In other words, God didn’t start with raw materials. God didn’t start with a lump of clay. God started with nothing.

The rest of the Scriptures illuminate this. For he spoke, and it came into being; he commanded, and it came into existence, we read in Psalm 33:9; while Psalm 90:2 declares, Before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world, from eternity to eternity, you are God. In response to Job’s questions, God answered him by reminding him of His creative acts:

Who fixed its dimensions? Certainly you know!

Who stretched a measuring line across it?

What supports its foundations?

Or who laid its cornerstone

while the morning stars sang together

and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Who enclosed the sea behind doors

when it burst from the womb,

when I made the clouds its garment

and total darkness its blanket,

when I determined its boundaries

and put its bars and doors in place,

when I declared, "You may come this far, but no farther;

your proud waves stop here"? (Job 38:5–11)

The New Testament also illuminates creation ex nihilo. John asserts that all things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created (John 1:3). Paul tells us that everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him (Col. 1:16) and that For from him and through him and to him are all things (Rom. 11:36). God calls things into existence that do not exist (Rom. 4:17). The writer of Hebrews says, by faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible (Heb.11:3).

Kidner describes God’s creation in this way: Our commands, even at their most precise, are mere outlines: they rely on existing materials and agencies to embody them, and the craftsman himself works with what he finds, to produce what he only knows in part. The Creator, on the other hand, in willing an end willed every smallest means to it, his thought shaping itself exactly to the least cell and atom, and his creative word wholly meaningful.⁵ Another theologian, John Frame, writes: Creation is an act of God alone, by which for his own glory, he brings into existence everything in the universe, things that had no existence prior to his creative word.⁶

Even the original Hebrew word used for God’s creative acts, bara, gives these acts distinction from the way humans make things. This word is only ever used in Scripture in relation to God’s creation. This means God is, as one theologian says, the creative and binding force of life.⁷

If this is true, if God is the creative and binding force of life, then the only right response is to lean in and learn more about our Maker. Too often our approach to Genesis, our approach to creation, bogs down in either shrugging dismissal of or intramural debates about the exact age of the earth or other tiresome debates. But I believe the first objective, when the Spirit inspired Moses to pen the words of Genesis, was to make a statement that there is a God who is always there, who breathed out creation with His words, who fashioned human beings with care and concern, who was at the beginning with an end in mind, who is Lord of history, Lord of creation.

Creation matters because it helps correct ideas about God, about humanity, and about the cosmos. The words of this ancient text came to an ancient Near East shaped by mystical and supernatural ideas, a framework that involved jealous and capricious deities and to the people of God who had spent centuries embedded in an Egyptian culture filled with false notions of the supernatural. Having seen God demonstrate His superiority over the gods of Egypt, Moses now intended for His people to learn the truth about who God is and who they were created to be.

David Atkinson explains how Genesis contrasts with the origin stories told in ancient Mesopotamia:

Whereas the Enuma Elish talks about many gods, Genesis proclaims a majestic monotheism: there is one God. Whereas in the Babylonian stories the divine spirit and cosmic matter exist side by side from eternity, Genesis proclaims God’s majestic distinction from everything else which in sovereign power he creates, and which depends on him for existence. Whereas in the Near Eastern mythology the sun, moon, stars and sea monsters are seen as powerful gods, Genesis tells us that they are merely creatures…. Whereas in the Mesopotamian myths, light emanates from the gods, in the Genesis narrative, God creates light by the power of his word … Genesis 1 sings the praise of the majestic Creator of all. It speaks of his life-giving power. It also gives a profound significance to human life … One can imagine what a rock of stability this chapter would have provided for the people of God when faced with the lure of pagan myths around them.⁸

We are so many centuries removed from the time when Moses, inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote about how the world began—and yet we are no less lured by our own pagan myths. The biblical story of creation is as relevant today as it was then and is a welcome antidote to the false ideas that pervade our world, ideas that afflict people with confusion and despair. The God of creation is not the God of materialism, that endless treadmill that sees this physical world and the acquiring of riches as the only end in